How To Be a Digital Friend

An old college friend appeared suddenly in my Facebook timeline last week. She popped up, apologized for not posting much recently, shared some mildly exciting career news, and vanished again. A quick check of her timeline reveals that this was her first post in nearly eighteen months.

I’m sorry to say, I hadn’t noticed she’d gone.

Nearly fifteen years ago, this young woman and I shared some classes together, in writing and literature. We didn’t know each other particularly well. I thought she did pretty well in Advanced Fiction Writing, but suffered from a tendency to censor herself unfairly. To my surprise, she’d graduated to a career unrelated to her English major: as a public affairs advocate, she probably writes a great deal, but her life has clearly gone different directions than mine.

Therefore I feel slightly bad admitting I’d forgotten about her. She didn’t do anything wrong; quite the contrary, she’s accomplished a great deal for people suffering from chronic disabilities, lobbying for greater inclusion and research funding in Washington, D.C. It’s just that, one day, she went quiet, and I never noticed. She deserves better than that.

How many other digital “friends” have vanished down this same memory hole in the intervening years? I’d need to skim my Facebook and Twitter lists, checking who’s posted anything recently, to know. But it forces me to wonder what makes friends in the massively connected digital landscape. Because clearly, our ability to instantly call up words from people we haven’t seen in years, changes what the definition means.

Ellen Hendriksen, Ph.D.

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen is merely the latest author I’ve read to reiterate something important: our friends aren’t necessarily the people with whom we have the most in common. Our friends are the people with whom we spend the most time. I’ve recently encountered many people who ask, in tones shading into desperation, how we make friends as adults. The answer, concisely, is: spend more time around people. Volunteer. Take night classes. Go to church.

Unfortunately, while science knows what makes meaningful adult relationships, the exigencies of late capitalism don’t permit physical time spent together. With an increasing fraction of adults required to work nights and weekends, getting involved in activities that permit making friends is exceedingly difficult. Many of us can’t spare time to maintain the friendships we already have.

Social media permits us to casually subvert this limitation. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have politely created venues where well-meaning adults can sustain contact with old friends, even those we haven’t seen in years. No more poky snail mail: I know what friends I haven’t actually seen in over twenty years are doing tonight. In exchange, I simply surrender personal data to Jack and Mark. Cambridge Analytica is a small price to pay.

But what happens when these “friendships” grow overwhelmed? Perhaps you’ve heard of the Dunbar Number, which calculates how many social relationships humans can organize before getting overburdened. That number, for humans, is about 150, or roughly the size of a medieval village. Facebook, by contrast, permits us to maintain 5000 “friends.” I’ve chosen to cap at around 250. But I don’t remember where I met all of them.

This means I’ve maintained parasocial relationships with former co-workers with whom I never had much in common besides the job, college classmates and former students whose lives and interests scarcely resemble mine, and fellow church parishioners whom I never see except on Sunday morning. My 250 friends include maybe twelve people I’ll see in a given week. What makes this a “friendship?”

Plato and Aristotle, painted by Raphael

Aristotle describes his complete ideal of friendship: two people, both alike in virtue, wish nothing but good for one another, and, where possible, strive to bring that wish to fruition. Returning to my friend who became a public services advocate, I indeed wish her nothing but success and happiness in her goals. When she boasts of her accomplishments, I feel good for her. Perhaps that makes me her friend.

Yet I don’t think we’ve been in a room together since 2005. We haven’t shared activities or time in fifteen years. If I never saw her again, my life would be poorer for not learning her accomplishments, but I doubt I’d even notice. Fifteen years along, my life trajectory probably wouldn’t change one whit if, with one mouse click, I quietly ended this friendship. That feels both sad and scary.

We keep digital friendships alive for decades. Then we digitally kill them in an instant. Strange world we live in.